far from over

Last night, Janet Napoles has surrendered to the president a day (or few days) after he placed a ten million peso bounty on her head. Janet Lim Napoles is the woman who was tagged as a major benefactor in the pork barrel scam and the person who created fake NGOs in order to receive large sums of money from the government and pocketed thirty percent of it (giving the rest back to the politician who authorised the fund’s release to the fake NGO).

My Facebook newsfeed and Twitter feed is running rampant with cries of foul and that the whole thing was horrendously scripted. Public trust is lost and we can all see the strings being pulled and the machinations of government mind control at its worst. Someone wrote on his Facebook wall, saying:

The handling of the Napoles surrender is so naively conceived (yes, conceived dahil judgmental ako). Last night while I was watching the news, 3 key triggers were strung to create a net-take-away (and luma ng concept) a. Napoles, nagparamdam na susuko kay Tagle. b. The President goes on cam to say that there’s a P10M reward for Napoles’ capture. c. Napoles surrenders to the President (then Napoles will be turned over to Roxas). Expected public perception outcomes : a. Tagle is outside the scam-loop, he is trustworthy = the President is like Tagle therefore he is trustworthy. b. The president trusts Roxas, so he is a trustworthy successor. c.The P10M reward ensures everyone is paying attention. None of that is happening, instead: a. Who is footing the P10M reward? Pera nanaman naming yan! b. The President is not the hero of the day, he is diminished by directly dealing with a perceived criminal. c. Napoles, is more powerful than the president and manipulated the whole system all the way to the President d. Napoles will turn state-witness therefore she is not the mastermind. d. Roxas will run in 2016, please give him a chance. Utang na loob ito ni Presidente kay Roxas. e. This smells too much of a script. f. Gawa ito ng mga Ancient Aliens. The President’s advisers should be fired.

This has to be carefully played out because the people are angry, they are still angry, and we want answers, and we want people to fall. We want a fast and precise investigation and we want the guilty parties all to receive the harshest penalty that the law provides.

We want a total uprooting of the current system that obviously does not work. We want transparency.

I wrote an article about the #millionpeoplemarch for YoungStar yesterday, and it was impassioned and full of hope, stating how significant that gathering was. Many might have seen it as unsuccessful, but I saw it as a powerful opening salvo of what we can do now that we have a common enemy. Different groups with different political ideologies can work together if the cause is great enough. Just because we didn’t hit one million people doesn’t mean we can’t reach that number.

But I wrote that article before Napoles had surrendered. The situation has changed and I wish I had written the article as something more hostile; more of a warning than a hopeful expression of my ideals. I hope that there isn’t enough space in YoungStar tomorrow that my article didn’t come out, or that someone else wrote something better. I feel that, with the situation what it is now, that it is off-key as an article.

This is far from over. People are watching and they are watching closely. Too many people have been implicated and words are not going to be enough this time round. All their statements and declarations about a corruption-free government and the “Daan Makatuwid” is all just bullshit, as of now. Their words are as effective as band aids on a cancer patient. We want action. We want to see actual results.

We want transparency. We want the Freedom of Information. What does the government have to hide? (photo taken from Facebook)

This isn’t over. It is far from over. We are not even in Act II of this sordid play just yet. We are still somewhere in Act I, I think. We were all ready to take to the streets and we can do it again. Truth of the matter, it’s in our blood. It’s in our genetic structure. We did it so many years ago when we toppled the Spanish regime back in the 19th Century, and we took to the mountains and brought the fight to the Japanese during World War 2. We marched in EDSA and deposed a dictator and we did it again to impeach a president.